VALERIE KILLSCROW-COPELAND: Something stopped us dead in our tracks, and I looked up to see this huge, furry man-beast standing before me.

COLLEEN NEW HOLY: And like many other people around the country and around the world, this sensation of there's something more began to bloom within her.

KEVIN ABOUREZK: It was well after midnight.

Our challenge that night was formidable; set up seven teepees before dawn and then await the backlash.

WES HAZARD: Tonight's theme is "On Sacred Ground."

♪ ♪ This episode of Stories from the Stage was recorded at Nebraska Public Media.

The Native people of North America have been creating and sharing stories for millennia.

From sacred origin stories, to everyday tales of normal life, they have passed these down from generation to generation, continually weaving and adding new stories, but the connection that has remained constant is their tie to Native American culture.

And tonight, our amazingly talented Indigenous storytellers from Nebraska will be sharing their stories from sacred ground.

(cheers and applause) ♪ ♪ ABOUREZK: My name is Kevin Abourezk.

I grew up in South Dakota.

I live now in Lincoln, I'm a married father of five, and I serve as managing editor for Indianz.com.

That's "Indianz" with a Z, it's a Native American news website.

And I've heard that you are particularly interested in spreading the word about the stories about the accomplishments, the lives, and tragedies of Native Americans.

And I'm so curious, what do you feel is missing in the mainstream awareness of the topics that you talk about?

Too often, when Native American people are the subject of news articles, it's something negative, it's, you know, a story about poverty, it's a story about hardship, or decline within our Native communities.

I think that mainstream America really needs to be able to see stories about accomplishments, about the resilience of our cultures and our beliefs.

So, that's, that's my job.

I'm wondering, you know, you have a background as a journalist.

Here, you're sharing a personal story on stage.

Do you feel that your career has informed you getting to this point or had a role to play?

I believe that my journalism really has prepared me for storytelling.

That's what you do in good journalism, you know?

You're telling stories, you're always trying to get to the heart of whatever it is you're writing about, you know, whether it's trying to find out what motivates a young Native mother to keep going and go to school and, you know, build a better life for herself.

You're always trying to get to that heart, that core of that story.

And what inspired you to share the story that you're going to share with us this evening?

I wanted other people to learn about our work here in Lincoln to protect our sacred Mother Earth.

And I just wanted people to, hopefully, feel some inspiration to stand up for their own parks and sacred places.

♪ ♪ On a cool, damp night under a new moon, nearly a dozen people drove two pickup trucks onto a hill and began unloading teepee poles and canvases.

Slowly, we lined up the poles one by one.

We were cold and tired.

We laughed about that.

It was well after midnight, and we couldn't risk somebody seeing even the smallest flashlight, so we did everything under the cover of darkness.

Our challenge that night was formidable; set up seven teepees before dawn and then await the backlash.

Earlier that day, as the sun had set, an Omaha grass dancer performed on the site where the teepees would be built and prayed for our endeavor.

We had spent the previous week preparing for this protest.

We had gathered in secret at the Lincoln Indian Center to establish teams, each one with its own charge.

One to set up the teepees, one to provide supplies to the encampment, and one to prepare for any legal backlash we might suffer, such as being arrested for occupying land that we didn't own and hadn't been invited to occupy.

Personally, I wasn't excited about the idea of being arrested.

I'd never been arrested.

My worst legal infraction involved carrying a cup of beer outside of a house party in college a week before my 21st birthday.

I didn't like the idea of acquiring a criminal history and becoming the stereotypical "no good Indian."

I didn't like the idea of giving a future employer a reason not to hire me.

But mostly, I didn't like the idea of anyone else from our encampment being arrested, but being arrested was a very strong possibility if we moved forward with our occupation of Snell Hill.

It was an audacious idea, thought up by a friend following a particularly disheartening city council meeting a week before that had ended with approval of a massive housing development right across the street from the city's largest park, as well as its oldest and most heavily used inipi or sweat lodge.

The memory of that city council meeting hung heavy in my thoughts.

My daughter and I had spoken at the meeting, trying to urge the city council to reject this massive housing development.

Dozens of people had joined us in an effort to do the same.

Having to watch as my friends and my daughter stood with tears outside that city council chamber motivated me to take action.

But it was the city council's unwillingness to even look at us while they deliberated this development that inspired us to set up seven teepees on the land where the housing development would be built, land that was owned by the Catholic Church, but was soon to be owned by a development company.

The property was in a fairly secluded part of town, with just a few homes around it, and Highway 77 on its western perimeter.

A few cars traveled on the gravel road as we set up the teepees.

We wanted the city to see us.

We wanted our city fathers and mothers to remember that we were here and we weren't going anywhere.

Being invisible is nothing new to Native people.

Centuries ago, the federal government had moved us onto isolated places, land that nobody wanted, and expected us to give up our hunter-gatherer lifestyles in favor of farming.

We had done our best to provide for ourselves.

On the hardscrabble earth of southwestern South Dakota, where my people, the Oglala and Rosebud Lakota, had been moved.

But we didn't take to farming, and we've struggled to make the transition to capitalism.

My own family has struggled with alcoholism, diabetes, and violence.

I've lost relatives in their 20s and 30s to drinking.

But I also grew up steeped in the cultural traditions of my people, and in the activism of Indigenous leaders like Russell Means and Frank LaMere.

Over the years, I'd become an activist myself, unwilling to stand idly by as my people are mistreated or exploited.

I'd begun my activism years earlier when, as president of my college's Native Student Association, I held a protest following the university's decision to penalize a Native student who had burned sage in his dorm room while praying.

Since then, I'd hosted numerous rallies and marches, and carried signs in protest of Native people slain by police.

And on a cool, damp night last April, I found myself hoisting teepee poles and draping heavy canvas over conical skeletons.

The people I joined on Snell Hill were mostly people I had joined in ceremony, but a few of them were fairly new friends.

Following our experience on Snell Hill, we all became like relatives.

As the sun crept over the eastern horizon that morning, I snapped a photo of the site.

The image of the seven teepees and the gray clouds above them looked like a grim watercolor painting.

It reminded me of my mood that morning-- proud, but anxious.

Shortly after 7:00 a.m. local media, law enforcement, and the Catholic Diocese all received email notifications of our occupation.

About an hour later, a police cruiser drove onto the site and got out.

The Native members of our camp stayed back while we sent a non-Native to negotiate with the officer.

I think I can speak for every Native person in the camp that morning when I express my feeling of fear and uncertainty over the presence of the officer on the site.

While we were all law-abiding citizens otherwise, that's never been a guarantee of civility when it comes to our interactions with police.

Native people are more likely than anyone to be killed by police.

That's why that morning we sent a non-Native member of our camp to talk to the officer.

That day we had chosen an artist named Josh, an affable, middle-aged man with a nice smile and a calm demeanor to talk to the officer.

They spoke for several minutes.

The officer didn't seem angry, but perhaps a bit annoyed.

After they finished their conversation, the officer got into his cruiser and drove away.

The moment had ended peacefully, and we went about the work of establishing the Niskíthe Prayer Camp.

In the end, we spent 16 days on Snell Hill, more than two weeks spent educating our neighbors about our cultural traditions and the reasons for our occupation.

We hosted many organizations, including churches, social justice organizations, and city council members.

We held ceremonies and celebrations for as many as 60 people.

Sixteen days spent getting to know one another and forging lasting friendships.

I wouldn't change anything about our occupation of Snell Hill, though we endured many trials-- wintry and rainy weather, even the occasional disagreement over how to proceed with our encampment.

And we had more than one angry person drive by, including one man who drove his pickup truck right up to our teepees, and got out and began yelling at our members.

And while we haven't been able to stop the housing development from happening, I believe that we sent a powerful message to our city leaders about the resilience of our Native cultural beliefs and practices.

And I believe we reminded everyone that we're here and we're not going anywhere.

But most importantly, I feel that we planted the seeds of advocacy within future environmental leaders, such as my daughter Maya, who I am certain one day will stand up for her people and her sacred Mother Earth or Unci Maka.

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) ♪ ♪ NEW HOLY: My name is Colleen New Holy.

I am a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe of Pine Ridge, South Dakota.

I did, however, grow up partially here in Nebraska in Macy.

I am an artist.

I am a, you know, writer at heart, for the most part.

Could you share with us any memories you have of growing up on the reservation?

Growing up on a reservation, you know, we had a lot of, I want to say fun, but it's also, like, you know, just a lot of freedom as well.

But the reservation that I primarily, you know, grew up on was Macy, of course, but every summer we would be taken up to Pine Ridge.

And Pine Ridge, you know, despite a lot of its poverty, it has a lot of spaces where you could go miles and miles and miles where there would never be fences.

There was this opportunity where if we wanted to go someplace, we could, just as long as we told our parents or our aunt and uncles what we were doing.

I hear people say things when I am out in the community doing the things I love.

They talk about my mother and how backwards, primitive she is, and how she practices witchcraft.

(chuckles) And the words that these people say, it can, it causes me great pain, because these people don't really know who my mother actually is.

And so, this is the story of my mother, Renée Sans Souci.

In the morning, she eats breakfast; her favorite meal is made of eggs, bacon, hash browns, and depending on her mood for that day, she will either drink a Diet Coke or she will choose coffee.

I have been cooking such a meal for her since I was ten years old and it is one of our greatest times to share in the morning.

She was born in July of 1962.

She had been a little girl watching the Apollo 11 moon landings, the broadcast live on TV, and like many other people around the country and around the world, this sensation of there's something more began to bloom within her.

And from that point forward, like many others, she began to search for such human possibility, because that's what it was; possibility.

My mother had been born in a time where Native American religious practice had been illegal.

The government had banned all forms of Native American traditional spirituality out of fear from what had happened with the Ghost Dance back in the 1880s, 1890s.

So she was never exposed to a spiritual life.

She would go, and she would ask her elders, "Why don't people do this anymore?"

And they would answer her with, "No one does this, Renée.

No one has done this in a very long time."

After breakfast, we adjourn to her office space.

It is during this time where she starts to share things from her own childhood.

You see, her mother, Alice Sans Souci, had been subjected to the boarding school system, and had never been able to properly bond or share things with her in a mother-and-daughter manner.

It had taken them many, many decades to reach that point where they could embrace each other and speak about a lot of these cultural things that my grandmother had never shared with my mother when she had been a child.

And it is also during this time where I begin to see things.

All of these stories that I had heard growing up, how they have come into focus and into context, and it is from this point where my mother continues on with her work.

Sometimes we drive to these places to give prayer: prayers for homes, prayers for businesses, prayers for people who are in need of help, and prayers for people who are making their journey home across the Milky Way.

And sometimes we encounter people who have never embraced their own traditional culture.

And so as we're going, or as we're leaving, she often says, "I don't, I don't blame them.

"They don't know their own culture.

I won't fault them for it."

My mother, at some point, due to health issues my grandfather experienced, met my... one of my paternal uncles and his ceremonial circle.

At this point, this had been after the Native American Religious Freedom Act had been signed into place, and ceremony was beginning to bloom back into being again; like our sacred pipe ceremony was no longer illegal, we could make relations with each other again.

And so my mother got to finally see and hold within her hands, the spirituality and the old ways that she had not had as a child.

But during this time, she had been selected by the spirits to become a spiritual leader, a medicine woman.

Medicine women had had a great role in our societies at one point in the past, but has since fallen to the wayside in favor of things like the Native American Church, which is entirely male-run.

So my mother is considered an atypical person among her tribe, as well as, to some degree, of my tribe.

It is when she comes home that she is able to take off her coat, take off her shoes, and lay down in bed to rest.

This is the time where we share small joys and small sorrows.

We say our prayers over our dinner, we pray, and we smudge off our house, our car, our cat.

(chuckling) And she continues to tell us the reasons why she has raised us the way she has with ceremony, and this is what she does for a living.

She educates children in the most basic of their spiritual ways.

She educates teachers, their parents, their grandparents.

She wants them to embrace this thing that had been taken from them a long, long time ago, but still there remains this stigma of witchcraft, of primitive practice.

And I see that every single day of how people don't understand.

But I am my mother's daughter, and someday I, too, will take up what she has taken up, and I will be as she is.

(cheers and applause) ♪ ♪ COPELAND: My name is Valery Killscrow Copeland, and I'm an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, and I live here in Omaha, Nebraska, and I do many things: I volunteer for the community, I run a family literacy program, and I'm a real estate agent.

And I understand that you came from a mixed family.

I'm wondering, especially when you were younger, what part of your cultural background did you really embrace the most?

COPELAND: My mother, she was of Jewish heritage and Irish, and my father's side, he's full-blood Oglala.

And my parents were very good at, um, encouraging us siblings to embrace both sides of our culture.

And I understand that growing up you had sort of a family of artists, and was art a really big part of your life as a child?

COPELAND: Oh, yes.

My mother was an artist, she was a very good painter.

And my father was a beadwork artist, and he taught my mom how to bead and together they made some beautiful pieces.

They've had pieces in museums, and they passed on their skills to us siblings.

And I'm curious tonight, when people listen to your story, what would you hope that they remember and keep with them?

It is a story about opening up your mind and seeing what's out there.

There's more to life than what you think.

When I was six years old, we lived in Salt Lake City.

My family were adventurous and outdoors people.

We liked to go camping, hiking, and one afternoon, we decided to go for a picnic in the Wasatch Mountains, and we found a beautiful picnic spot right beside a creek.

We sat down to lunch, and a cute little chipmunk jumped on top of the picnic table, and grabbed the hot dog right from my bun, and we had a good laugh.

(audience chuckling) After lunch, we ventured down to the creek.

We noticed in the bushes that there was something unusual poking out of the bushes-- it had antlers, and we didn't know what it was.

We went to investigate, and to our surprise, we'd seen a moose head, a very large moose head with jagged flesh around the neck, and there was bones and veins coming out.

And we were really shocked, it had really big eyes, and the rest of the body wasn't anywhere to be found.

My dad walked up and down the creek and he could not find the body.

And I remember him telling my mother that he thought that was very unusual, that something could rip the head of a moose off.

They'd have to be very strong.

So we started walking up the trail, it was a pretty steep incline, and after a little bit, my little sister started getting tired.

And so my dad picked her up, and put her on his shoulders, and we continued walking, and we took a few breaks at the stream.

And at that time, you could actually drink from the stream because it was perfectly safe.

My dad, brother, and sister decided to stay behind and fill up some canteens.

And when they were doing that, my mom and I decided to venture off and go on the trail ahead of them.

And I remember thinking, what a beautiful day, it was so perfect, and there was just a little bit of wind coming down from the mountains, and it was so nice, and it was a spectacular view as we were climbing the mountain.

On the left side, you could see the valley below, and on the right side was the forest and boulders.

And I remember thinking, "Should we be so far ahead of my family?"

And I started to smell something bad, and I didn't know what it was.

It had like a rotting smell.

And I asked my mother, "What is that smell, Mom?"

And she was like, "I don't know, maybe it's a dead animal."

We kept hiking up the trail, enjoying the view.

It was such a beautiful day, and my father, and brother, and sister were still far behind us, and something stirred in the bushes off to my right, and I just didn't know what it was.

And as we were coming around the corner, something stopped us dead in our tracks.

I felt a sensation of fur all over me, and I looked up to see this huge furry, man-beast standing before me.

And we were so shocked, this happened, like, in a second, but it was like it happened in slow motion.

And the creature began to raise his arms like this.

And my mom came out of her daze, and she grabbed me by my hand, and she took off running with me.

And she was tall, and I was little, and I could only keep up with her for a very short time.

And we ran down that mountain, and I started getting covered in scrapes, and my pants started tearing.

And we started to see my father, and brother, and sister as we were going down, and we did not even stop for them.

We went right by them.

And my mom said, "Run, Bigfoot is on his way!

He's after us!"

(audience laughter) And they did not question, they just took off running, too.

And we got all the way down to the bottom of the trail, and we sat in the Volkswagen, and my mom retold the story to my dad, and my dad was really interested.

My dad was like the Indigenous Rambo, and he had a long Bowie knife on his side.

He was so brave, and he was not afraid.

So my dad came down the mountain and he didn't see Bigfoot.

He had told me that Bigfoot is a helper of people, of our Native people, but he said also he could cause harm.

And when Bigfoot is hunting, and you're nearby him, he could pick up very large boulders and toss them near you and scare you away.

About a year later, we were hiking once again, we were going to go on a picnic, and across... or in the middle of the lake, these people in a canoe started screaming, and we just couldn't figure out what are they screaming at?

And everybody around the lake just started looking at them in the middle of the lake.

Then they started pointing, and we looked at what they were pointing at, and it was Bigfoot, just as I seen before.

And Bigfoot did a big growl, and everybody was just running, except my family.

So my father started to communicate with Bigfoot.

He raised his hands like this, and Bigfoot raised his hands like this.

He crossed his arms like this, and Bigfoot crossed his arms like that.

And then he leaned against the tree, and believe it or not, Bigfoot leaned against the tree.

Then he turned and vanished, and that's the last I seen of Bigfoot.

And I'm very grateful that I got to experience these encounters, because I feel like Bigfoot has given me creativity and open-mindedness, and that has helped me to be a more creative artist.

Perhaps Bigfoot has given me the ability to see things that other people can't see.

(cheers and applause) ♪ ♪